Free weight lifting is and will remain an important part of the fitness industry for a very long time to come. Those who use free weights to exercise benefit from the efficiency, low-complexity, and portability offered by the ability to move equipment, such as dumbbells and barbells and sometimes accompanying plate weights to any type of bench (flat, incline, or decline), an outdoor location, or other location of their choice. This is in comparison to exercising with a dedicated nautilus or single motion or single-purpose cable resistance machine which is often very large and generally limited to a given location.
One popular free weight exercise is the dumbbell press. The dumbbell press, when executed on a flat bench, is performed by a weight lifter grasping a dumbbell in each hand, then, while lying with the lifter's back flat on a bench with arms bent, spread away from the torso, and generally with the upper arm parallel to the top of the shoulders, pressing the hands up and away from the bench while urging the hands together over the chest. This dumbbell press is especially popular as it exercises multiple chest or pectoral muscles in a single motion, and can be replicated on an incline or decline bench, offering varied angles of hand press relative to the lifter's torso position. However, as a weight lifter's strength increases, heavier and heavier dumbbells are needed to continue to build muscle and improve strength, often requiring the use of single dumbbell weights exceeding 150 lbs. These heavier dumbbells present a significant safety risk to the lifters, as the lifters often have to pull the dumbbells off standing racks, carry them to the bench, and curl or lift them into position while seated on the bench, all resulting in unwarranted stress on back, shoulder, elbow, and wrist joints and raising risk for injury to the lifter and those nearby. This risk erodes the portability desired by those who exercise with free weights.
A second popular, and arguably the most popular, free weight exercise is the barbell press. One benefit of the barbell press, in contrast to handling increasingly heavy dumbbells and the related aforementioned risks, is that as a weight lifter sees increases in strength, the lifter need only add a weight plate, often weighing 45 pounds, to either end of the barbell that is typically positioned on a rack integrated with the bench. The barbell press, like the dumbbell press, can be executed on while lying on a flat bench with arms positioned like those for a dumbbell press and targets the chest or pectoral muscles. However, unlike the dumbbell press, the lifter uses a single barbell held with both hands fixed in position relative to one another, and when the lifter presses the hands up and away from the bench there is no urging of the hands together over the chest. This hand restriction reduces the efficiency of the exercise, as only the outer pectoral muscles are utilized, and also places undue strain on the shoulder joints not present with the dumbbell press. This restriction erodes the efficiency desired by those who exercise with free weights.
Accordingly, there exists an opportunity to improve the safety and efficiency of free weight exercises that target the pectoral muscles while maintaining the portability and low-complexity free weight lifters desire.